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Business English vocabulary · Office Idioms and Phrases

Put out fires

Meaning in business english, with examples

idiomCommon term

In business english, put out fires means: To deal repeatedly with urgent problems instead of planned work.

In Turkish: sürekli acil sorunlarla uğraşmak

How it is used

Informal description of reactive work. In this business sense there need not be any actual fire or physical emergency.

Example sentences

  1. We spend every morning trying to put out fires caused by incorrect orders from the previous day.

    Repeated order errors force the team into reactive work.

  2. If managers only put out fires, they have little time to improve the process causing them.

    Immediate fixes crowd out work on the underlying cause.

Common collocations

  • spend time putting out fires
  • constantly put out fires
  • workloadThe amount of work that a person or a team has to do in a given period of time.
  • prioritizeTo decide which tasks are most important and deal with them first, or to treat one thing as more important than others.

More terms: Office Idioms and Phrases

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